The developer team at Wikimedia Foundation is making some changes to how accounts work, as part of our ongoing efforts to provide new and better tools for our users (like cross-wiki notifications). To support these changes, users must have the same account name everywhere. This will let us give you new features that will help you edit and discuss better, and will allow more flexible user permissions for tools. One of the pre-conditions for this is that user accounts will now have to be unique across all 900 Wikimedia wikis.

Unfortunately, some accounts are currently not unique across all our wikis, but instead clash with other users who have the same account name. To make sure that all of these users can use Wikimedia's wikis in the future, we will be renaming a number of these accounts to have "~" and the name of their wiki added to the end of their accounts' name. This will take place in April 2015. For example, a user called "Example" on the Swedish Wiktionary who will be renamed would become "Example~svwiktionary".

All accounts will still work as before, and will continue to be credited for all their edits made so far. However, users with renamed accounts (whom we will be contacting individually) will have to use the new account name when they log in.